- Wages: Average weekly earnings for employees increased by 3.8 per cent compared with a year earlier – growing by 2.0 per cent after adjusting for inflation – meaning people have more money in their pockets.
- Employment: 32.69 million (up 282,000 over the last year and up by 3.65 million since 2010).
- Employment rate: 75.9 per cent (up 0.3 points over the past year and up 5.7 points since 2010).
- Unemployment: 1.31 million (down 49,000 over the past year and down by 1.20 million since 2010).
- Unemployment rate: 3.9 per cent (down 0.2 points over the past year and down 4.1 points since 2010) –more than halving since 2010 (8.0 per cent).
- Youth unemployment: There are 445,000 fewer young people out of work since 2010 – almost halving since 2010.
Conservatives are helping families with the cost of living so they have more money in their pockets and can provide for themselves and their families:
- Raising wages to put more money in peoples’ pockets – increasing the National Living Wage to £10.50. The NLW is set to be £10.50 in 2024, benefiting over 4 million people with a full-time worker on the NLW seeing an increase in their annual pay of over £4,000 (Conservatives, 30 September 2019, link).
- Keeping taxes low, having already cut taxes for 32 million working people so they can keep more of what they earn. To help people with the cost of living we have cut income tax by increasing the personal allowance to £12,500. A typical basic rate taxpayer now pays £1,205 less tax than in 2010 and we’ve increased
- the number of people taken out of income tax since 2015-16 to 1.74 million (HM Treasury, Autumn Budget 2018, 29 October 2018, link).
- Doubling free child care to help parents with the cost of living. We are spending a record £6 billion on childcare support and are investing more than any other government in childcare, including £3.5 billion on early education entitlements this year alone (Parliament, WQ226095, 4 March 2019, link).